Rinehart Romnesia

I love to read things that put the modern narrative into a bit of real world perspective.

Gina Rinehart recently revealed her stupendous ignorance of the system, how she became successful, and how normal people live. So ridiculously stupid and self absorbed were her comments, that I'd suggest she needs a bit of professional counselling to help her actually understand that she's not living in some fairy land of her own mind, but in a world where the reality of life is far removed from her mind's eye.

Contrary to her assertions, people actually can, and do enjoy life without committing their soul to the modern capitalist altar of money making at all costs. Things like family relationships for example, which it's well known that hers are fucked. Imagine, being that bloody rich, and you still can't get on with your own grown kids. Let alone not bothering to have her hair done. All that money flowing in must be very time consuming. But I digress....

So I've bumped into this wonderful opinion piece today in the SMH, from a George Monbiot, never heard of him. He starts this piece with a great flurry, and you just know from the first paragraph he's going for the jugular:

We could call it Romnesia: the ability of the very rich to forget the context in which they made their money. To forget their education, inheritance, family networks, contacts and introductions. To forget the workers whose labour enriched them. To forget the infrastructure and security, the educated workforce, the contracts, subsidies and bailouts the government provided. Read more

Ah, music to my eyeballs. 

Of course, he uses Gina as an example, I mean who wouldn't? She's the anti-thesis of everything egalitarian, apparently giving modern capitalism a big bear hug (pun intended) in appreciation of her imagined status as some kind of lecturing auntie, telling all us minions that opportunity is within all of our reach (as long as we don't drink, smoke, or socialise, but work instead..... um, by the look of that hair it's obvious she doesn't do much socialising?). Hmmmm.... apologies for carrying on about her looks, but really, FFS, WTF is she thinking going out in public like that? At least she could do us all a favour and get her hair done. She looks like Miss piggy from the Muppets, but even she's got better hair.

Anyway, the writer goes on and also brings Mad Mitt into the conversation. After all, he's another one living in la la land completely unconnected with the reality of at least 47% of the population. Perhaps he could do with a bit of therapy as well? There must be a name for this psychological condition? Reality Denial maybe, I dunno.

Remembering her roots is what Rinehart fails to do. She forgot to add that if you want to become a millionaire - in her case a billionaire - it helps to inherit an iron ore mine and a fortune from your father and to ride a commodities boom. Had she spent her life lying in bed and throwing darts at the wall, she would still be stupendously rich. 

Rich lists are stuffed with people who either inherited their money or who made it through rent-seeking activities: by means other than innovation and productive effort. They're a catalogue of speculators, property barons, dukes, IT monopolists, loan sharks, bank chiefs, oil sheikhs, mining magnates, oligarchs and chief executives paid out of all proportion to any value they generate. Looters, in short. The richest mining barons are those to whom governments sold natural resources for a song. Russian, Mexican and British oligarchs acquired underpriced public assets through privatisation, and now run a toll-booth economy. Bankers use incomprehensible instruments to fleece their clients and the taxpayer. But as rentiers capture the economy, the opposite story must be told. 

Scarcely a Republican speech fails to reprise the Richard Hunter narrative, and almost all these rags-to-riches tales turn out to be bunkum. ''Everything that Ann and I have,'' Mitt Romney claims, ''we earned the old-fashioned way.'' Old fashioned like Blackbeard, perhaps. 

Two searing exposures in Rolling Stone magazine document the leveraged buyouts which destroyed viable companies, value and jobs, and the costly federal bailout which saved Romney's political skin. 

Romney personifies economic parasitism. The financial sector has become a job-destroying, life-crushing machine, which impoverishes others to enrich itself. The tighter its grip on politics, the more its representatives must tell the opposite story: of life-affirming enterprise, innovation and investment, of brave entrepreneurs making their fortunes out of nothing but grit and wit. 

There is an obvious flip side to this story. ''Anyone can make it - I did without help'' translates as ''I refuse to pay taxes to help other people, as they can help themselves'' - whether or not they inherited an iron ore mine from daddy. In the article in which she urged the poor to emulate her, Rinehart also proposed that the minimum wage should be reduced. Who needs fair pay if anyone can become a millionaire? Read more

BTW I'm not the slightest bit interested in the debate. Whoever "wins" it won't make any difference to the end result on election day, despite what the media says.